Elizabeth Pender

Elizabeth (Liz) Pender is the Senior Gender-based Violence/Humanitarian Protection Advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. Since starting with OFDA, Pendere has provided technical support to OFDA-funded programs in Nigeria, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria, while also managing OFDA’s global engagement on the GBV Call to Action and Safe from the Start initiatives. Before coming to OFDA, Liz was the Senior GBV Coordinator with UNFPA in Myanmar (Burma), managing and coordinating UNFPA’s GBV Programs in Kachin and Rakhine States, and leading the GBV Sub-cluster for the overall humanitarian response at the regional and national levels. From 2010 to 2013, Pender was the Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) Senior Coordinator for the International Rescue Committee’s Emergency Response Team. While with IRC, Pender was deployed to several conflict and natural disaster responses in Pakistan, Libya, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya (Dada’ab), Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Lebanon (Syrian refugee response), to design and support WPE emergency responses in each location.